Episode 5234: Debate For Troops On The Ground Continues; Strait Of Hormuz Conflict Is Not Stopping Anytime Soon
Stephen K. Bannon analyzes the ongoing Strait of Hormuz conflict, citing Trump's claim of destroying 130 Iranian vessels and 8,000 sorties while intelligence suggests unclogging the strait requires six months. The discussion details an Israeli strike on a Qatar-Iranian gas field causing $14 billion in losses and debates whether air power suffices or if "boots on the ground" are needed to secure uranium sites. Ultimately, the episode argues that appeasement failed and warns that unresolved tensions could escalate into broader regional warfare despite current diplomatic stalling. [Automatically generated summary]
With thousands more ground forces heading to the Gulf, President Trump signals the fighting could soon be over.
Quoting from his social media post from late today, we are getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great military efforts in the Middle East with respect to the terrorist regime of Iran.
The Hormuz Strait, he adds, will have to be guarded and policed as necessary by other nations who use it.
The United States does not.
He finishes by saying, if asked, we will help these countries in their Hormuz efforts, but it shouldn't be necessary once Iran's threat is eradicated.
Importantly, it will be an easy military operation for them.
In short, getting out and leaving American allies to fend for themselves, as for the declaring victory part, he did that as well today.
Sources in the intelligence community and the administration tell us that unclogging the strait is a problem without a clear solution, one that a recent intelligence assessment determined could drag on for as long as six months.
Now, a Pentagon spokesman dismissed that notion, though, telling CNN, quote, one assessment does not mean the assessment is plausible and it's dangerous for the media to cherry-pick the worst-case scenario to scare the American people.
Still, it is hard to find anyone with any experience in the region saying that safeguarding the strait will be, as the president just put it, an easy military operation or that it will open itself, which he also said today.
First of all, we haven't even, as of this hour, this Friday night, we haven't entered the third week of this conflict.
In terms of intelligence, military display of power, there's never been anything like this in the history of warfare, ever.
And yet, people making proclamations, oh, Donald Trump, listen to Israel and to Bibi and to people like you and to people like me.
They don't know Donald Trump if they're making idiotic statements like that.
But here's fundamentally what it came down to for me.
Steve Witkoff meets, the president wants a deal.
The president wants peace.
They rejected it.
They're clinging to their nuclear ambition.
And here is the option.
Either we learn the lessons of history in the last hundred years where over 100 million human souls died and we preempt a raging Islamic fascist regime now before potentially millions can get killed, or we hand that off to our children and grandchildren.
Not an option for me.
I don't think it's an option for you.
I know it's not.
And it certainly wasn't an option for Donald Trump.
And he made that calculation after Steve Witkoff told them that in 10 days they'd have enough weapons-grade enriched uranium for 11 bombs.
On day 22 of combat operations, U.S. forces continued to take bold action and remain on plan to eliminate Iran's ability to project meaningful power outside its borders.
Just two days ago, the U.S. Army launched the longest field artillery strike in Army combat history using precision strike missiles.
The strike took out Iranian military infrastructure, demonstrating the U.S. military's unmatched reach and lethality.
Iran has lost significant combat capability over the last three weeks.
We are taking out thousands of Iranian missiles, advanced attack drones, and all of Iran's Navy, which they use to harass international shipping.
Their navy is not sailing, their tactical fighters are not flying, and they've lost the ability to launch missiles and drones at the high rates seen at the beginning of the conflict.
U.S. forces maintain air superiority over Iran's skies, having now flown over 8,000 combat flights.
Our air crews are performing exceptionally across the fight, from tankers to fighters and bombers to land-based and carrier-based aviation doing a superb job.
Tankers are extending our reach so that we can keep constant pressure on the enemy.
Fighters and bombers are delivering precision strikes against our primary objectives.
And our pilots across the board are dynamically hunting threats as well, finding and eliminating targets in real time.
So far, we've struck over 8,000 military targets, including 130 Iranian vessels, constituting the largest elimination of a Navy over a three-week period since World War II.
Well, first, I would want to say that the very early mission accomplished, we could end the war, that sounds quite familiar to a lot of Americans right now.
I think, I hate to say it, but I think that we have gotten ourselves into a scenario where we may need boots on the ground.
And the reason I say that is because you can't launch an all-air campaign with just airstrikes without actually having a presence in country.
Even if you're not trying, I don't think you can do it at all.
I think that it's very disruptive to the country in general, because think about this, the civilian, from the perspective of the civilian populace in country, they are just seeing buildings getting destroyed.
And I have no doubt that CENTCOM is getting really good targets, and it looks like we are hitting the targets that we want.
But we're also hitting targets that are creating serious civilian casualties.
And so if you don't have boots on the ground actually monitoring what's going on in country, that can spiral out of control very quickly.
And if you want to compare it to Iraq in 2003, where we saw an insurgency emerge, the scenario there is not even comparable to what we're dealing with here.
Iraq is about half the size of Iran.
And in 2003, Iraq and later in 2014, when we went back to try to weed out the Islamic State, we had a multi-country coalition in country with us, fighting alongside us, and actual boots on the ground.
We also had State Department resources, USAID, NGOs.
We had groups there doing building, doing reconstruction.
By contrast, right now on the ground in Iran, all there is is destruction.
And there is no functional government.
We are making sure that there is no functional government to help people rebuild.
And so that leaves civilians with the question of who is helping us?
Who are the good guys here?
Could we actually see then American boots on the ground going deep into the tunnels?
The reality here is that essentially during Defense Secretary Hegset's press conferences or even during the president's interviews, they make war sound easy, that air power alone is going to topple the Iranian government or prevent Iran from ever getting a nuclear bomb.
Those goals, particularly the one about the nuclear bomb, cannot be achieved without American boots on the ground.
And as we talked about earlier, you might need American boots just to open the Strait of Hormuz.
And so this idea of sort of, and I hate to say waging war on the cheap, I mean, that makes it politically palatable.
Our air power and our air force is extraordinary, but you're not going to be able to remove this thousand pounds of uranium that isn't enriched to a level where it can be made a bomb.
And this is this other problem.
Just yesterday, Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel said that Iran doesn't have the ability to enrich that uranium now to a higher level.
It looks like the strikes have destroyed the centrifuges they need to.
So that uranium is not the threat Trump is claiming.
And then if he does think it's an existential threat, he's going to send Americans in.
They will be on the ground for hours.
They're going to be going into places that the U.S. bombed last year.
Tunnels that existed were bombed by the U.S.
So American troops will go in and have to dig through dirt and sand to get down to these storage bunkers that hold this uranium.
They'll be on the ground for hours.
And the Iranians will be trying to pick them off and kill as many Americans as possible.
We also remain zeroed in on dismantling Iran's decades-old threat to the free flow of commerce throughout the Strait of Hormuz.
For example, earlier this week, we dropped multiple 5,000-pound bombs on an underground facility located along Iran's coastline.
The Iranian regime used the Harden Underground facility to discreetly store anti-ship cruise missiles, mobile missile launchers, and other equipment that presented a dangerous risk to international shipping.
We not only took out the facility, but also destroyed intelligence support sites and missile radar relays that were used to monitor ship movements.
Iran's ability to threaten freedom of navigation in and around the Strait of Hormuz is degraded as a result, and we will not stop pursuing these targets.
Because everybody's asleep at the wheel and they're not paying attention.
Well, you have a president who's not asleep at the wheel.
And now we're talking about nuclear weapons.
And I ask you this, Mr. and Mrs. America.
What if the other side is wrong?
What if they would use nuclear missiles against us?
What if this regime is evil?
What if it is a seventh century throwback?
What if they really believe in death?
What if they really do believe in everything they've said over and over and over again?
Should we risk the existence of the United States?
Should we risk the lives of 350 million people?
What's the Democrat plan?
We've already seen what they've done.
Or these neo-fascist podcaster isolationists.
What's their plan?
They have no plan because they have no mind.
Let me tell you something.
During the Revolutionary War, we had, of course, Benedict Arnold.
You know what we have now?
We have scores of Benedict Arnold's out there trying to undermine our troops, trying to sabotage our effort, do all these things that are going on that we hear about our media.
Can you imagine a media like this during the Revolutionary War, seven and a half year war?
We lost most of the battles we fought, almost all of them.
Can you imagine what the media would be saying today?
It's Saturday, 21 March in the year of our Lord 2026.
Welcome for our Saturday show.
We're going to get a lot.
Captain Finnell is going to join us in a moment.
We're going to go through the military operations and the progress that we're making there.
Eric Bowling's going to join us also.
We're going to talk about oil markets, impact on the world economy, how we go forward, President Trump, pretty blunt yesterday, saying, hey, when I talk to my military leaders, I think we've accomplished what we set out to accomplish militarily.
And if you want to keep the Strait of Hormuz open and oil coming and gas coming from the LNG, coming from the Persian Gulf, the Allies, the Arabs, Asians, and particularly NATO are going to have to step up here, keep the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz open.
I think Tel Aviv Levin has now become the new Baghdad Bob.
I think he makes the case more and more every day of why this has to be reviewed and reviewed in depth.
And it's not right now the imminent threat.
There will be plenty of time for that later.
What we have to review, and we'll get into this in the show, and I'll do even a deeper dive tomorrow, is now it's become evident that 17% of the capacity of the Qatar gas field, the one they have in joint ownership with the, they have joint ownership with the Iranians, but they actually, I think, run it.
17% of the capacity has been destroyed.
And they are talking about forced majeure on five-year contracts, virtually all of them, I think, in Europe.
How that happened.
How, once again, two big inflection points, the two, I think, biggest inflection points that have come during the military operation was the bombing of the oil facilities in Tehran a couple of Saturday nights ago, I think two weeks ago, against a specific standing order from the commander-in-chief of the United States.
That would be Donald J. Trump.
That standing order is still out there.
You are not to touch Iranian oil facilities.
The Khar Island event by a magnificent military took out the military targets in precision, did not touch the oil targets.
Yet the Israelis, once again, went against a standing order from the commander-in-chief and bombed, bombed the Iranian part.
Turns out they got the Qatari part two of this gas field.
17% of the capacity we now know.
That has to be investigated, has to be investigated now.
Well, Steve, I'd like to start off with Admiral Cooper's final statement in that video he put out here a couple hours ago.
He said he gave the force, the 50,000-plus American service members, three guidances, pieces of guidance.
The first was to be relentlessly lethal.
And I think we'll talk about the lethal part.
Then he said, be a good shipmate, be a good partner, teammate.
And then the last thing he said is steady your resolve.
And so when I listen to the Cold Open, I see a lot of folks that are civilians, a lot of folks that seem to be losing their resolve.
So when I, you know, I just put that out there to say, you know, let's not lose our resolve and let's focus in on what's happening.
And what's happening is that, as the Admiral said, we've conducted over 8,000 sorties and we've struck over 8,500 targets.
And we're relentlessly pursuing the Iranians' capability to project meaningful power outside of their borders.
Now, there's been some exceptions, but he said we're steadily making progress there.
And the Iranians' ability to do that is declining.
And empirically, we can see that.
For instance, in the ballistic missile launches, they have gone down.
They're not eliminated, but they have gone down dramatically in the first 21 days of this conflict, the first three weeks.
Now, we did see last night, Iranians launched two ballistic intermediate-range ballistic missiles, the Khor Ramshah IV, a ballistic missile towards Diego Garcia.
One of the missiles broke up, malfunctioned in flight.
The second one was engaged and shot down by a U.S. Navy Aegis destroyer with the standard missile 3, and it shot that missile down.
So, yep, that's a concern.
That'll probably be taking more attention now about where did that come from and how did they get out and have the ability to do that.
The missile itself, there was some estimates that most of the IC's estimates and in the public domain said that the Iranians didn't have anything over or just around 4,000 kilometers.
Diego Garcia is just about 4,000 kilometers from Iran.
And this missile that was engaged and shot down, it was only previously seen to fly 2,000 to 3,000 kilometers.
So this has gone well beyond what the assessments were.
So a little bit of a, you know, they're taking a last-ditch effort.
It looked to me like it was a Hail Mary.
Let's see if we can strike Diego Garcia.
And it's not going to work because of our ability to shoot down.
And the fact that we thought ahead and we put Aegis SM-3 integrated air and missile defense warships that protect Diego and our other locations.
And oh, by the way, the Iranians still obviously have some cognizance because they did this strike right after Prime Minister Starmer of the United Kingdom announced that he was going to let the U.S. use RAF Fairford in the UK and Diego to launch attacks into Iran.
So they're still fighting, but their ability to be hurtful is being diminished.
Another area that we can assess is in the Strait of Hormuz.
Admiral Cooper mentioned that we dropped multiple 5,000-pound bombs.
Those are the GBU-72s.
They're 5,000 pounds.
They can penetrate 150 feet, 50 meters.
And we dropped several of those.
It's the first time those have ever been used in combat.
And they're going for these hardened artillery sites, these underground storage bunkers and underground missile launchers for anti-ship cruise missiles and mines and anything else that could affect the strait.
And when you again look at the statistics and you go to the UK's Maritime Trade Office and their Joint Maritime Information Center update from last night, we're now still have not had any vessel attacks in the Strait of Hormuz for well over a week.
There's been a couple of incidents on the north or south side of the strait, but those have been drones and no ship was actually hit, just some debris fell on them.
So there's no Iranians are not successfully attacking ships.
Now ships are, you know, what we see from AIS, only one ship transited yesterday, but there's dark fleet ships that are going through still.
And there's no, the UK's MTO also says there's no evidence of mines in the Strait of Hormuz.
So there is an effect there.
The fact that there's no mines have been detected, the fact that there's no ships that have been struck inside the Strait of Hormuz for days now, many days, for over a week, shows that we're having an impact.
So what I think, I get back to what Admiral Cooper said, steady our resolve.
This campaign is working and it's working significantly to reduce the ability of the Iranians to have any coordinated, devastating impact on us.
Now, they're going to be able to pop off a missile here and there, like you talked about with some of the oil refineries.
But I think we're at a position now where we just got to keep grinding on.
And so when I hear army officers on CNN and other places say that air power cannot work, well, it can work because if the goal is to make sure that the Iranian regime is declawed and doesn't have the ability to send out missiles and mines and ships and aircraft and those kinds of platforms that can be devastating, we are achieving that.
The other objectives about regime change and things of that nature, I'm not sure the president's there on that.
Right now, we're taking the gun away from the Iranian regime.
And I agree with you with what CENCOM and even the joint staff under General Kane have.
But we did for the first four or five days of this war, because Admiral Cooper is very specific.
The ability to project power in the region or against people in the region, particularly the Gulf Arab states in Israel.
That's a change, though, from the remember, first couple of days.
We follow this quite closely.
It was about an uprising in the streets.
It was about power projection, not just in the region, but power projection against their own people.
That has been noticeably that objective, which kind of got inserted in there after the first couple of days, is noticeably missing.
There is no uprising in the streets.
I think when people also talk about it was only Netanyahu who the Other day said, you can't do this by bombing.
You have to put troops in if you want to bring the regime down.
That was his.
Now, I think his foreign minister or defense minister walked him back and said, that uprising, those boots on the ground have to be the Iranian people.
But when people talk about boots on the ground now, I mean, it's the joint staff and CENTCOM, I'm sure, under the direction of the president that has the Tripoli coming from Japan with what, 2,500 Marines and the Boxer coming from San Diego with 2,200 Marines to head to the North Arabian Sea to add a capacity and a capability, not it'll be used,
to actually have some sort of amphibious assault or something upon Karg Island and even the littoral, the actual shores around Hormuz where they did this massive bombing.
I mean, that's a potential.
So, and now they're talking about potentially, and this has been Netanyahu's talked about this, and people in the administration have leaked to the press about the possibility if you're going to really make sure that you have 110% probability that they can't get nuclear again.
You got to get in and get the material that somehow that'd be a command or special forces raid.
Your assessment of that, because this is the war as defined by CENCOM and their military objectives, you're defanging and declawing.
I don't think there's any doubt as we've had you on and gone through now for what 22 days or however many days we've been at this, I think, is going, as you said, just write down very methodically.
And people should understand, as Pete Heggs tells us, every day is more intense than the day before.
I think he talked about what 10,000, 8,000 combat sorties already.
So it's intense.
But these other aspects of it are because of the kind of the expansion of the war away from just the declawing and defanging, Captain.
Well, I think the movement of the two Muse out of Japan and out of San Diego and the boxer out of San Diego, I think that is, you know, they have a thing called the TIP to the time-phased force movement process that the military has in their war plans.
And so we were probably at a point in this process where if certain things didn't get resolved, if certain actions didn't happen, then there was the plan that said, okay, trip these groups, these MUS, to start moving towards the West so that we can have that option to use them in some capacity.
Now, what capacity is the real question?
And my sense is, is given the tit-for-tat that's been going on against these oil fields and what Iran did against Gutter, I think the president's probably concerned that the Iranians in the last desperation, like they did with these intermediate-range ballistic missiles towards Diego Garcia, may be thinking, we're going down, we're going to take out Carg Island, and we're going to screw up the world's economy.
And so the president may have decided that it's time to make sure that we secure Karg Island and that put in Patriot and other interceptor systems there to protect it from the Iranians destroying it.
That's how I think if we're going to have any kind of action there, it would be that way.
And a MU has got what they call a MUSOC, special operations capable.
So they'll be the kind of people that'll know how to look for unexploded ordnance, mines, booby traps, things of that nature.
But the goal would be to protect the oil and make sure that Iran cannot destroy the world's global oil supply.
We only get a couple minutes, but some of the allies, I think, are actually stepping up and hearing President Trump.
But for the Navy to take this on and keep it clear, your thoughts, because this is the question everybody's asking, particularly in global capital markets, sir.
Yeah, Steve, I think, you know, while we discuss, and, you know, before the war started, my concerns about the size of the U.S. Navy and the lack of ships, I think that with the two carrier strike groups that are out there, the Ford and the Lincoln, the French carrier that's out there with its assorted escorts, we have ships right now that could start an escorting process.
The reason that we're not starting this because the commander at CENTCOM is not convinced that he has eliminated the threat in and around the Strait of Hormuz, and they're going to keep bombing and keep taking out all those resources until they have that confidence.
And then they can come in and start doing this.
And I think when you add in now that just got revealed in the last 24 hours at the UK, Germany, Italy, France, and Japan, and it was really give the credit to Prime Minister Takeichi for breaking the log jam and showing these Europeans that our closest ally right now is Japan.
And so by her doing that, I think it unlocked the people to say, okay, we're going to help.
So add in, you know, a dozen or so ships from those nations and you develop a system.
And by the way, as Admiral Donegan, the former commander of Fifth Fleet in AvSense, said last Sunday on television on ABC, he said, in February, we had just practiced, 30 nations had practiced doing these kind of escort operations.
We've been practicing and training.
We have a standing maritime force that does this kind of work out there in the Fifth Fleet area of responsibility.
So this isn't just some pickup game or something that we're picking up on the fly.
These are things that we train to.
There's people identified.
There's command and control networks.
There's communications networks.
There's all kinds of things that are already well developed, well trained to, and we know how to do it.
It's just a matter of making sure that you just don't walk in and let the guy have anti-ship cruise missiles and start shooting at you.
You want to do everything in your power to eliminate all of that.
The world being right now focused on the oil and gas market straight of Hormuz, but particularly now that it's been fully developed.
Americans ought to be outraged at this.
That 17% of the capacity of liquefied natural gas coming from that joint Qatar-Iranian oil field.
And to have Captain Finnell right there say, hey, it could be Gator Damarong with the Iranians, the Persians, to take it all down around them.
And no offense, just logic of war.
If they feel they're going to get wiped out and they're kind of messianic, you know, a cultish Mahdi, 12th Iman or 13th Iman, whoever it is, why not take it all down around you?
That's got to be in the playbook.
The 17% capacity, and I think Iraq last night put in force majeure because their refineries have been hit.
The Qataris who are outraged by this because this attack was initiated by the Israelis to start things off, is I know they're lighting up the president saying, hey, you know, we didn't start this war and now, you know, we could have five years.
We have to shut down this field.
What's the implication of all this?
And what's the way out of here?
The president, yesterday, you could tell, hey, we won.
I've done, you know, CENTCOM's destroyed this thing.
Captain Finnell just reiterates what a magnificent job the military is doing.
And he's saying, hey, look, Hormuz is your problem.
Europe and Japan and Asia, China, you guys deal with it.
Your thoughts, Eric Bowling, on a Saturday morning.
Europe is really dependent on Middle East and Russian natural gas.
That brings it off.
So liquefied natural gas can be shipped.
So if it's coming offline over there, someone will buy it over here, even though it's more expensive to transport it.
But guess what?
With prices higher, it may become, that's why oil is fungible.
So wherever the price happens, it doesn't matter of the location.
That's why all ships, all oil prices rise with one major disruption.
Zero ships, 138 ships per day on average through the Strait of Hormuz, zero ships at all, 20 million barrels a day, zero barrels a day going through right now.
I have a re listen, they have an idea what they're doing in the situation in DC, but to allow, Scott Besson says, we're going to allow them to sell 140 million barrels of Iranian oil that's sitting out in the sea in the Gulf somewhere.
We're going to give them $14 billion, $14 billion to play with, Steve.
You yourself said when the Iranians feel like this is an existential threat, they'll fight to the death.
We're going to hand them a lifeline.
We're going to feed them an injection of testosterone, for lack of a better word.
All I heard was we're going to allow them to sell 100.
I think what it is, is we talked about it for the last two weeks, Steve.
The Achilles to Trump.
Trump has the strongest military in the world at his fingertips.
He's got an Achilles, though.
It's the high gasoline price of the pump in an election cycle, in the midterm election cycle.
And they know that.
So the longer it drags out, the worse it becomes.
When you allow the Iranians, and then you're going to do a 40-day lift, allowing Iranians to sell oil, the sanctions against Iranian oil.
That's not part of what Besson said.
They're going to allow Iranians to sell oil because the Chinese are buying it too cheap right now.
I just don't know.
Some of them don't make sense to me.
That's basically what I'm saying.
But I do know when the Iranians feel like it's this or the end, they're going to fight to the death.
Steve, they have probably 2,000 or 3,000, the equivalent of our Tomahawk missiles.
Remember, that's probably, I don't know, what, 2,000-mile shoreline for the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf of Persian Gulf, that they can lob missiles and they can also use these unmanned drone kind of mines throughout the Gulf.
So I told you, we spoke to a captain who, not a captain, a guy who owns a shipping company that ships through the Strait of Hormuz.
He says, it doesn't matter.
U.S. Navy ships aren't doing it.
They're not in that area right now because it's not safe.
So they're not even safe with our major destroyers and mine sweepers.
If it's not safe for the Navy, it's going to be a warning time.
When you notice the combatants, when you notice the combatants are not cruising through there, that's always a good signal that CENCOM has not cleared the area.
So what's going to happen?
And you've been great at predicting these markets now.
One of the issues the audience should understand, the longer they stay up.
And also understand this.
The Arab nations, which are going crazy saying, we didn't start this, we didn't want to do it.
And now you're crushing us, Dubai's crush.
You know, it's not going to be right for 30 or 40 years.
They're also playing the double game in the fact that they love $100 oil, right?
Trump had it down at 50.
Trump wanted full spectrum energy dominance at 40.
It's going the other direction.
They're in no hurry to get it below 100 bucks, are they?
No, we talked about the Qataris and Saudis and the Baranis and the Omanis saying, go, Trump, go.
And then they all shut in production the minute they can.
They declare force majeures whether they have to or not, because they can hide behind the war as a potential force measure.
Because I certainly would like to sell my oil at $110 a barrel versus the $55 a barrel it was when we cut that deal.
So they can force majeure on the 55 and sell it for 100.
They're not going to bring production online right away.
You clear the Gulf tomorrow.
It could be 30, 45, maybe 90 days before some of these countries bring it back online because they know, they know that they can slowly, slowly reduce the price of oil themselves without Trump and without supply or demand.
They can just pull the supply off the market, keep the supply off the market longer.
So we'll work through our stockpiles, which are backing up.
We'll work through that.
And all of a sudden, we're like, wait a minute, where's the new oil?
Well, you know, it took us a long time to restart those oil fields.
It took them a day to bring them down.
It took them three, four months because they want the higher prices.
I'm very skeptical that all these Middle Eastern Arab countries aren't actually winking a nod, maybe even communicating with Tehran or whoever's running the show, the IRGC, and said, just let us know before you're going to bomb that refinery or let us know before you can bomb that oil platform so that we'll remove our people.
Guess what?
We'll see higher oil prices later.
Steve, the first day we were on a couple of weeks ago, gasoline was, I think it was $3.11.
And I said, it's going to be $4.
I guarantee it.
Well, we're going to hit $4 probably on Monday.
People scoffed.
They laughed.
I'm going to make an ominous prediction right here: $5 gasoline nationally.
So on Birch Gold, also birchgold.com, promo code Bannon.
If you want to get a little more thorough, the end of the dollar empire, you get access now to the printed edition.
We've taken all the seven first installments and put it in, put it in one print edition if you want it.
Graphics are amazing.
Team did a great job.
You can understand the direction of particularly with things like, I don't know, $200 billion price tag, at least initial price tag for this war, on top of the $1.2 trillion debt we already have.
Wharton School analysis do something about budget.
I'm trying to get him up on the show.
We're trying to find time.
He came out with analysis.
It's $100 trillion in debt.
Not even contingent liabilities.
He actually has worked it through.
He said it's $100 trillion in debt.
He may be closer to the facts.
What did someone who was on the show yesterday said getting close to a $3 trillion deficit?
We've had that deficit coming down.
You know, Scott Vesants wants to get to 3% of GDP, all of that.
End of the dollar empire.
Find out about it today.
Talk to Philip Patrick in the team, particularly gold as a hedge in the turbulence of capital markets.
Gold had its worst week in 43 years.
What does that mean?
What does it mean for you?
Go check it out.
We're going to get Philip back up here on Monday.
Talk it all through.
Wynton Hall, next hour, because we're just not going to be maniacally focused on this war.
Although President Trump, as we said back in the summer, when he had a carry battle group down there outside of the Red Sea on the gate of tears, that strait is actually tougher than Hormuz by a long shot.
That one goes in the Red Sea and up to Suez, which is 100% to the Europeans.
We had a carry battle group and the Houthis, look, they're henry.
They're tough ombres.
They were given as good as they got them, right?
It's a European problem.
We said at the time, and the European, in China, in Japan, Hormuz, that's your deal, not our deal.
Of course, it affects the global economy and that impacts us, but we're all good.
So I think President Trump, he was pretty adamant on the lawn getting ready to go to Mar-a-Lago yesterday saying, hey, look, I took care.
I took the nuclear capability, sank the Navy, blew up their Air Force, did all of this.
You guys have really pitched in.
In fact, you've been kind of hemming and haunted.
Time to step up.
That's President Trump putting, as we say in the Navy, a shot across the bow.
On two main things.
One, the Chinese Communist Party's existential threat.
The other is artificial intelligence and hurtling towards the singularity.
Code Red is the book that you need to get up to speed on what this really means politics and for your kids.
Look, the jobs apocalypse.
You know, Pal came out the other day and had pretty shocking news.
And we're going to get EJ Antoni up next week.
He's been traveling around.
He gave a big interview to the Financial Times about the economy, but it was kind of a shocker because I think it gets to the heart of this AI situation.
And people got to remember when they see these announcements, big layoffs, if they don't say it's related to AI, it is all related to AI.
Okay, the cutting staff, et cetera.
So Code Red gets into this and particularly the crisis we're going to face on job creation and particularly high value added job creation that people can really build a family of four around, sir.
I mean, one of the things we all remember was Rahm Emanuel, never let a crisis go to waste.
I think we really have to understand the political power game that's being played here.
So sometimes you hear from the conservative movement, oh, this is all hype.
It's just marketing.
You're trying to raise capital, investment, and so forth.
And, you know, we've heard in the Industrial Revolution that, you know, all of this was going to be a disruption and it ended up creating more jobs.
It's the lump of labor fallacy.
I think what we need to understand is it almost doesn't matter which way this turns out because it can be weaponized to build support for universal basic income and that fear and panic.
So whether you think it is going to happen or you don't, you're going to see efforts to push it.
And let me just give you a couple of quick examples of that.
So we all know that, of course, Elon Musk has said that AI is a, quote, supersonic tsunami headed towards humanity, right?
And I think we all agree it's going to affect everything from education to jobs to national security.
And that's literally why I wrote Code Red to kind of walk us through all of the different fault lines as this seismic shift unfolds.
The second thing is, of course, Dario Amade, the head of Anthropic, saying just a month and a half ago that in 12 months, Steve, we're not talking about out into the wild future.
This is 12 months from now.
He says we're looking at between 12 months and five years, 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs being disrupted.
Now, that's our college kids, right?
The kids, our kids, you know, so you take out a big loan to get your kid through college.
They play by the rules.
You do everything you can.
And now you're talking about a wipeout of that lower rung of starting.
And we all know we all had great mentors and you have to be able to move yourself up professionally and develop.
If you hack off that lower rung of the job opportunity, what's that going to hollow out for middle management and upper management long term?
But more than that, what are those kids going to do?
And then Mustafa Suleiman, Microsoft AI CEO, says that in 12 to 18 months, again, just from now, we're looking at the ability to replace 100% of white collar job tasks, not exact jobs, but he is saying the tasks that you would be able to do.
And so over time, automating that away.
Now, if you think that that is a bunch of hype, fine, that's great.
But understand, forces very well funded, are using that fear mechanism, whether you think it's real or not, to build support for things like universal basic income, wealth redistribution, a global economic reset.
We've seen Bill Gates seeding the narrative terrain with this idea of a three or a four day work week.
We've seen the Bernie Sanders element of that as well, trying to argue for a European style, you know, 37 hour a week work week and so forth.
So the point that you have to understand, and this is what I try to do in Code Red, is explain that this is a power game, just as much as it is a tool that we might use for productivity or our own efficiencies and so forth.
And I think that's the real way to get ahead.
I mean, one of the things I've always learned from you is you've got to be able to connect those dots so that you can think five steps ahead of where somebody else is on that chessboard.